The Impact of Presentation Order on the Attraction Effect in Decision-making

Jennifer Trueblood, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA

Aneesha Dasari, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA

Abstract

The attraction effect in decision-making is a famous example of
how preferences are influenced by the availability of other options. One emerging
hypothesis for the effect is that biases in attention influence preferences. In
the past, these ideas have been explored indirectly through computational
modeling and eye tracking. In the present paper, we directly manipulate attention
through presentation order, presenting choice options sequentially. Our results
show that presentation order has a large impact on the effect – some
presentation orders enhance the effect and other orders reverse the effect. To
understand these results, we fit a dynamic model, called the Multiattribute
Linear Ballistic Accumulator model, to the choice and response time data.
Modeling results reveal that presentation order influences the allocation of
attention on the positive and negative differences between options. In sum, our
results show that attention has a direct impact on the attraction effect.